Transitioning from a Product Manager to a Product Leader

Setting up mechanisms to scale as a PM

Photo by Luke McKeown on Unsplash

As you navigate your product career, your role will evolve in terms of scope, ownership, and influence. You need to be more effective as a PM at each of these junctures to uplevel the effectiveness of your team. As a PM, you are at the intersection of multiple teams (engineering, science, sales, UX, marketing, BD), and being the closest to the product with the most context, each function seeks inputs and direction from you. You don’t want to become the bottleneck and slow the team down, but at the same time, you don’t want to be spending your entire day providing inputs, unblocking cross-functional teams, or responding to queries on the office communicator. In order to transition from a Product Manager to a Product Leader, you need to think about how you can evolve from being a ‘doer’ to a ‘lode star’ making sure that the team is building the right product for your customers. It is essential for a PM to take a step back and focus on the big picture, rather than being caught up in the day-to-day at all times. And for that, you need to guard your time as if your life depends on it :)

How do you do it?

Below are some tactics we have found useful in our product journey to scale ourselves as well as the output of the entire team

1. Managing time effectively 

2. Empowering the team to operate independently  

3. Creating visibility for yourself & the team

4. Setting clear boundaries & expectations 

5. Recharging yourself

1. Managing time effectively ⏰⏰

As a PM, you always have a long list of to-dos and meetings 🗓. Before you realize it, the day has ended, and you were not able to spend time on the things that actually mattered. Often PMs say “weekends and late nights are the only time I can focus on important tasks”. However, it is not a sustainable way to live your life😴. Managing your time well means that you are focusing on time and energy on tasks that have the highest ROI for the product and customers. What really helped us navigate this tricky situation is adopting a simple habit: Create daily and weekly goals for yourself. Spend 15 min every morning planning the day and prioritizing your list of tasks using the Eisenhower Matrix, aka, the Urgent/ Important grid. We talk at length about how to use this framework in our last article PM Mental Models Part 2, but the TLDR is that you broadly bucket your tasks on the Urgent/ important grid 

In addition to prioritization of tasks, Here are a couple of other frameworks/ tips to manage your time effectively:

• Utilize your calendar well 

  • Plan your week ahead of time by blocking collaboration time, 1:1 time, and focus time slots on your calendar

  • Experiment with times in the day that you are most productive and adjust your focus blocks accordingly 

• Create or leverage existing templates for recurring tasks - e.g weekly business review templates, progress reports, roadmap, etc. Find help to the extent possible (program managers, EMs), and follow standardized templates for reporting so that you do not have to create multiple reports for different audiences. Involve all the leads and have them pitch in on their sections. You can also create templates for the team e.g Build a template that any engineer on the team can leverage to draft weekly release notes instead of relying on you to draft them each time

• Create a working backward schedule for important deliverables: A very powerful tool to plan for important deliverables is the working backwards schedule. Usually, important deliverables come with a deadline (e.g. a roadmap review with leadership 20 days from now, a webinar next month, etc.). Creating an effective working backward plan involved three steps: a) breaking down the task into milestones with owners, b) aligning on these milestones with the team, and c) Setting up check-ins to ensure that the team is not slipping on the milestones. If there are unforeseen circumstances due to which slips are inevitable (unplanned vacation, new priorities, etc.), make sure these are communicated upwards in a timely manner. This helps the team feel involved in important decision-making, and at the same time ensures you are not the one solely driving these deliverables. Here is a rough work back plan for a product webinar to be delivered on May 25th, 2021.

Fig 1. Sample work back schedule

2. Empowering team members to operate independently🧗🧗

To transition from being a ‘doer’ to a ‘lode star’, you need to empower your team to operate independently without being overly reliant on you. Context, coaching, and communication are crucial to accomplish this 

• Provide appropriate context for everyone in the team to be effective 

  • The team will often go through churn while executing on the product vision. Take time to onboard every new member to the product vision, customer context, features, and roadmap. The more clarity each team member has, the more effective they will be

  • Create onboarding content for the team especially for customer-facing roles. 

It’s crucial to have a FAQ document and a Roadmap deck that can be referenced and used by BD or the Sales team independently during customer meetings. 

• Foster effective collaboration dynamics between cross-functional teams

  • Avoid being the middle-person between 2 partners wherever you can e.g. Get engineers to review work directly with designers for design input 

  • Watch out for areas where someone’s voice might get lost while getting them to collaborate directly and coach the team on effective tactics e.g how to provide quality feedback in a design critique

Define and communicate the types of inputs and decisions that the team needs from you. Prioritize the ones where you need to help the team vs where you can be optionally involved e.g. Ask engineers to come to you with 2 options to resolve a user complaint vs just asking how to resolve this. This lightens your load but more importantly, also makes each team member feel included

3. Creating visibility for yourself & the team👀🔦

It’s crucial to ensure that the team is set up for success from a resourcing standpoint - this could be your own bandwidth or other resourcing on the team. It is helpful to continually provide this transparency to people beyond the team i.e cross-functional partners and management. Below are a couple of useful tactics: Create a running list of tasks (in Jira or other task management tool used by your organization) and provide visibility to your manager/team so you’re not stretched to the brink

• Ask for help early and often if you feel you don’t have adequate support. Create visibility with leadership, especially with your manager in your 1:1s if you or the team is spread too thin or feel that some tasks will fall because of bandwidth issues.

4. Setting clear boundaries & expectations 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♂️

It is important to let your team know where to draw the line to preserve your wellbeing as well as to set the team culture leading by example

• Switch off - With global teams and multiple tasks waiting on you, it’s easy to constantly be on the go 24/7 but this may not help you maximize productivity. Take time to rest and recover  

• Communicate clear boundaries and set expectations with the team - e.g. “I will not be available on weekends”, “I will not be available from 5-6 pm because that’s my workout time” etc. 

• Set expectations with the team on turn-around for your input. As a PM everyone needs your inputs. Often team members ping you on chat and expect a prompt response because it is “urgent” or they are “blocked”. Set up rules - e.g. “If you want my feedback on something, or need an input, my turn-around time would be up to 24 hours”. Set up weekly/ bi-weekly PM office hours where the team members can get their queries answered in one go rather than coming to you with piecemeal problems. You can still prioritize important/ urgent requests to be answered in real-time (really, use the Eisenhower Matrix!!) but 80% of the issues usually do not require you to drop everything else and can wait.

5. Recharging yourself 🔋🔋

PM is a high-pressure job, so you need to recharge your batteries. Below are some tips that have helped us 

• Have a routine throughout the day i.e worktime, work-out time, family time, or pet-time if you have one 

• Build healthy habits e.g. getting up every hour for water, every half-hour for stretching, never skip meals

• Plan happy hours and team events to foster team spirit

• Find meaning outside work - pursue hobbies, side projects, mentor people.

• Take time off without feeling guilty to blow the steam off

Last but not least - have fun together! 😎 Happy teams are most effective at shipping impactful products 🚀

We would love to hear if you found these tips helpful in the comments below! 💡Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates every week 📆 on more product learnings. Tell about it to your friends so that they can join us on this journey 🤜🏻🤛🏻 We would love any feedback here.